For a lot of people, it is really hard to conceptualize anything other than what is going on at that very moment in their life. It's weird being better than that and wondering why, but there's a line between believing you are better and actually being better. When you skirt the line, you may lose sight of the greater goal.
Chemistry is a lot more ubiquitous than a lot of people realize. It's a really good theory that is successful in describing pretty much everything that ever occurs. But it's still not complete, because it takes a separate discipline to describe what happens when an atom magically changes its identity. Not that it happens super frequently, but it also kind of depends on what you consider frequently. Like one in a hundred? Thousand? Billion? In terms of atoms, a billion isn't necessarily even a lot to us. Granted, an atom spontaneously changing its identity is probably significantly more scarce that one in a billion.
Atoms and molecules in the gas phase move around at something like 100 to 800 meters (or 0.1 to 0.8 kilometers) per second or more, which is as stupid-fast as it sounds. It means that, even if you just crack the window a little bit, chances are a given molecule can find its way outside (or inside) in a short time. There are a lot of molecules, too.
The word googol was coined in a book, as was a googolplex. It's kind of cute. I didn't actually read the book, but Wikipedia says that a googolplex was originally proposed to represent one followed by as many zeroes as you could write. We should donate to Wikipedia sometimes because it is a very abundant wealth of knowledge.
There are something like 13 billion bases in one copy of a human genome, which isn't all that many given how complex we are. It's about half that (or less) if you consider the fact that DNA forms a double-stranded helix. Genes are written on both strands, mind you, but only one strand is required to reproduce the code. There is also epigenetics, which may drastically increase the amount of influence that a single base or sequence can hold.
If everything is ideal, a mammalian cell makes less than one mistake every time it divides (not accounting for the mitochondria), which is a lot less often than I make a mistake.
Some people on here have suggested that a book can be written in a week or a month. I guess it depends on the book, but it couldn't be that substantial of one. How can they possibly be as accurate as a single cell? I could just be a bad writer, but I got decent grades so maybe not.
Decent.
I'm tired now. Until next time...
✌💚🎵
